Mesosphere Launches First Datacentre Operating System

“Our vision in building the DCOS was that applications should be the first class citizens in the datacentre, not servers,”

Mesosphere, creators of the world’s first datacentre operating system, today announced the launch of Mesosphere DCOS, the industry’s first datacentre operating system that pools compute resources, automates common operations, and brings to the datacentre the same efficiencies that operating systems brought to personal computing. The core of Mesosphere’s technology runs some of the largest sites on the internet including Twitter, Airbnb and Hubspot.

The Mesosphere DCOS provides developers and operators an interface to automate allocation and deallocation of datacentre resources to run today’s most popular distributed applications and services. As the first operating system to support resource coordination across multiple servers, the DCOS' key features include:

A distributed systems kernel with enterprise-grade security, based on Apache Mesos.
A set of core system services, including a distributed init system (Marathon), distributed cron (Chronos), service discovery (DNS), storage (HDFS), and others, all capable of launching containers at scale.
A user interface, including a command line for controlling the Mesosphere DCOS and visual tools for understanding how your datacentre is operating.
Killer apps and an ecosystem of datacentre services, including Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, Apache YARN, Apache HDFS, and Google’s Kubernetes, supported by Mesosphere and third parties as native services on the Mesosphere DCOS.
A public and private repository, which allows operators to deliver third-party and custom-built datacentre services to their business with a one-command install.
An API and software development kit (SDK) that lets programmers develop against datacentre like it’s one big computer, which aids quickly building applications and services that scale with built-in high availability and fault tolerance.
Support for a wide variety of platforms, including:
All modern versions of Linux: Redhat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and CoreOS
On-cloud: Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, Microsoft, Rackspace, VMware
On-premise: Bare metal, VMware, OpenStack

The Mesosphere DCOS builds upon the popular distributed systems kernel, Apache Mesos, which provides primitives for resource management, container-based isolation and scheduling across entire datacentres and cloud environments. Since launching with $10M in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz in June, Mesosphere’s growing team has worked to extend the libraries, platforms, cloud hosts and Linux distributions supported by DCOS. Mesosphere DCOS also includes hardened features around security, cost-accounting, alerting, and other core areas required in enterprise production environments.

“This is an operating system being built by distributed systems developers, to tackle the biggest inefficiencies that we see in how today’s applications and services interface with compute resources,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and Co-Founder at Mesosphere. “From resource sharing, to handling failure, and everything in between - the mission of the DCOS is to bring automation where automation makes sense, and to give developers and operators much finer grained control of their environments, while freeing them from low level plumbing.”

Today the Mesosphere DCOS supports all modern versions of Linux, including CoreOS, CentOS, Ubuntu and Redhat, and runs on-premise on bare metal or in a virtualised private cloud, such as with VMware or OpenStack. The Mesosphere DCOS also runs on all the major public cloud services, including Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and VMware vCloud Air.

“Mesosphere is the manifest destiny of cloud computing,” said Brad Silverberg, who ran the team that launched Windows 95 at Microsoft and is co-founder of Fuel Capital. “Virtual machines are a step along the way, but the new breed of datacentre services run across fleets of machines. The Mesosphere DCOS is the first operating system to unleash the full power of the cloud — you can run existing applications, but you can also build new applications, bringing automation to processes that otherwise require too much human oversight and simply do not scale.”

Since 2010, Twitter has run its private datacenters on Mesos. Airbnb and Hubspot manage their Amazon cloud infrastructures with Mesos. And other companies “powered by Mesos” include eBay, Netflix, OpenTable, PayPal and Groupon. Mesos is the only distributed systems kernel proven at scale, running thousands of cores, thousands of servers, in production at web-scale organisations.

The Mesosphere DCOS can span thousands of machines in a datacentre or cloud, pooling resources so they behave like one big computer. This makes it easy for operators to launch datacentre services without having to provision new clusters, while also making it more efficient for developers to build new datacentre apps by programmatically writing against an API that spans the datacentre.

“Our vision in building the DCOS was that applications should be the first class citizens in the datacentre, not servers,” said Benjamin Hindman, who co-created Mesos at Berkeley AMPLab and joined Mesosphere from Twitter. “Operators and developers should be able to launch applications using available resources on a cluster with the same ease with which a user launches an application on a computer or mobile device.”

Just like a host (single machine) operating system, Mesosphere DCOS enables multiple development teams to execute multiple applications (made up of multiple processes) concurrently, across a shared collection of resources. Mesosphere DCOS runs on top of all popular Linux OS distros, and any resource management done by the host operating system (like multiplexing and time slicing) is still applicable, and leveraged by the DCOS, deferring to the host operating system directly. This ability to keep existing host operating systems (no “rip and replace” required) makes Mesosphere DCOS accessible to any enterprise running Linux, no matter their “stack” or hardware preferences.

About MesosphereMesosphere (Twitter: @Mesosphere) is building the datacentre operating system (DCOS) to help enterprises unlock the next generation of scale, efficiency and automation. The Mesosphere DCOS pools datacentre and compute resources, gives IT operators a much simpler administration model, and improves developer velocity with more modern abstractions and APIs for writing distributed systems. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mesosphere is headquartered in San Francisco with a second office in Hamburg, Germany.